A Passage

I just received a call that cancer finally took my cousin-in-law, Marion Uldrick, this morning. I was flower girl in his marriage to my cousin, Virginia, shown in the photo below This post is for you, Marion. Thanks for making an awkward teenager girl feel special.



To Grand Old Men

Lift a glass
for what has passed
and what will come,
as roses preen
and white mums sigh
their soft goodbyes
around us.

Once you kissed
a hundred lips,
raced horses wild
through midnight fields,
sang drunken dreams
to kith and kin,
til aging skin and worn-out heart
dragged sweet sung words
to mounded earth
before the stanza ended.

Pris Campbell
(c)2001

Yesterday's Kiss

Our bodies play
hide and seek.
Your tongue probes
my mouth, searching
for yesterday's kiss.

You know
how to ask for sex
in six different languages.
I wish you were as
proficient in love.

When you leave,
I bury my head
in your pillow,
dare not breathe,
lest your scent
take me captive again.

Later, your voice crawls out
of my answering machine
'I want you'
Using that red dress
you bought me,
I smother your pleas.

Pris Campbell
11/17/2001

Published Blackmail Press 2002

Pageland , South Carolina. 1977

One of my favorite pics of me with my folks.

Pectoral Control and Hawaii

It's been a rough spot for me, healthwise for a bit now. Sometimes, when that happens I think of a happy time in my life and imagine myself there. I see it as if it's here again right now and I'm transported to easier days.

So here's one of those times...when I lived in Hawaii in the late sixties, I visited the Big Island with the psychology chief, also a friend, who was consulting there for the weekend. He always stayed with a Hawaiian man who ran an open bar (no walls, just the liquor part locked up) in the woods.

There were tons of bedrooms since his entertainers stayed there too. Now THAT was some house...bedrooms and kitchen all at one end...built on the point of a black lava cliff with the two ocean sides seen by full length panes of glass along both walls of a huge room with indoor outdoor carpeting, an indoor swimming pool and patio furniture. A woman who twirled torches on her boobs was staying when I was there. She gave an (unlit) demo for us before the night's show and I have to say, I've never been so impressed with muscle control in my life before or since.

Letters Not Sent

There were ten of them,
skin the color of desert dust.
We culled them from cells
the size of barbwired closets
into that courtyard where
we laughed , watched
them strip, toss off torn rags-
discarded cloth fluttering
like yesterday's butterflies, made
them spread their cheeks wide, enter
the next man down the line,
made our own chain of daisies
like the ones made in childhood,
took photos not attached to letters
or sent (Son, I'm so proud),
knew we were showing
those terrorists who was
boss and serving our
country too, but oh mom,
I still smell their fear and
their sex on my hands.
It's been weeks now.



Pris Campbell
©2004

Soot

I ride my bike
along the pink dawn rim.
I never fell from the sky,
never forgot to stop laughing.
Your daisies never died.

I lived once in a purple room,
hung my clothes from a
lopsided crate, lip-
synched with ELO, rasped
with Rod Stewart.
Owned nothing. Nothing owned me.
I flew every night,
sparks winging from hands and feet.

I glance at my hands.
Soot still covers my fingertips.

Pris Campbell
(c)2005

Julia Darling

Her blog and final poem can be found HERE. An extremely moving site.

Chats With Eleanor

Fairy Godmothers with ample laps
and June Cleaver faces slid down the rabbit hole
of old dial-up phones, ten cent colas, Betsy Wetsys,
and scratchy LPs an innocent lifetime ago.

Try strutting about now in tiara and starched skirt,
waving a wand---the madhouse will open its jaws
and swallow you whole, but

my fairy godmother is clever.
She dresses like Eleanor Roosevelt,
talks like Eleanor., looks like Eleanor,
says she is Eleanor, back from the dead.

Each night she brings me hot chocolate, sits,
tell stories about quiet fireside chats,
her husband's withered legs and how much
she thought he loved her before Lucy.

She reminds me to floss every night
and to be sure to carry an umbrella
should sudden thunderstorms threaten.
She emphasizes that one must learn to
be brave in cold emptied beds
ever so much as on battlefields,
littered with the corpses of those
who once called our name.


Pris Campbell
©2005

Patriot Act Revisited

Read an article at Eweekly about how the Patriot Act allows the FBI to not only gather information about any of us without showing just cause, but also doesn't allow businesses they gather it from to divulge that this is being done to anyone, not even a lawyer. Click HERE to read. By the way, this is an interesting weekly to subscribe to if you're interested in computer events.

DoLily Whiteflower

DooLily Whiteflower lets
her nails grow till they curl
like the coils in her Chevy,
paints them Vampire Sky black,
half-moons on each tip.

She never plants a flower,
does dishes,
cooks or
cleans house.
That's what LeRoy is for.

White trash, her backdraft,
the hushed whisper
whenever she ventures to town.

I'll be in the Guinness,
she announces. They'll say,
That DooLily, she sure
had great nails.

Visual Poetry

Check out my new link to the right....'Very Unusual Visual Poetry'. A real treat!